Summer has rolled around, and that means it is time for my
annual season of Smallville. I started watching this show on DVD years
after it started, and I’ve finally made it to season 9. While I had been a bit disappointed with last
season, I found this one to be quite fun.

The season starts off three weeks after the season eight
cliffhanger. Lois Lane (Erica Durance)
has been missing for 3 weeks, and her cousin Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) is
doing everything she can to find her.
Meanwhile, Clark Kent (Tom Welling) has decided that his attachments are
holding him back from his mission to save humanity, so he has gone off on his
own and increased his training. And
Oliver Queen (Justin Hartley) is going into a self-destructive spiral over his
guilt for the events of last season.

When Lois does show up with an assassin in tow, she has no
clue where she has been or even that she was gone. Tess Mercer (Cassidy Freeman) is extremely
interested in where Lois has been, leading Clark to return to his old life in
order to protect Lois as her memories return.

Tess has her own agenda, however, helping the Kryptonians
who have just appeared thanks to an artifact that she found. They are led by Zod (Callum Blue), and they
don’t seem to have the powers that Clark does.
Has Clark found some people like him?
Or do they bring a new threat to the planet that Clark loves?

Even though I am not super familiar with comic books, I do
know Zod, so it was easy to see the villain from the very beginning. However, I really appreciated how they
developed him over the course of the season.
He was more than just a power hungry guy. Of course, they had a full season to develop
him instead of a couple of hours in a movie, so that certainly helped.

Really, the season was filled with great development
overall. The season long story arc was
well thought through and developed in a logical manner, answering some of the
great questions we received early on before setting up a final showdown. Meanwhile, we also got some standalone
episodes that entertained.

The core cast had some great material to work with as
well. The early episodes that show Oliver/Green
Arrow’s growth are fantastic. I still
can’t figure out what Tess is up to. I
do know which side she is on, however – hers.
She makes an interesting foil for our heroes since she’s not quite hero
and not quite villain. Sometimes in
other shows, that waffling can be annoying (Sylar in Heroes, for example), but the writers make it work well here.

Of course, the biggest advancement of the season comes to
Lois and Clark, who start dating during the season. This leads to some very funny moments and
some more serious moments as Clark toys with letting Lois in on his secret.

You’ll notice I haven’t said much about Chloe. That’s because she often gets the least
amount to do. She converts the tower she
got at the end of season 8 into a super high-tech computer center, and then she
is used to give out plot information in the form of stuff she’s taken from
surveillance cameras or research she’s found on the internet. Essentially, she’s the data dump for
information to advance the story, a job she’s always had, but that seems to be
about all she’s good for this season.
Chloe does get some fun stuff late in the season, and Allison Mack makes
the most of it, but the writers left her out of the main action for the most
part.

Like Allison, the rest of the cast is wonderful once
again. They bring every moment to life
perfectly, whether it’s comedy, drama, or some subtle shade in between. The effects are still perfectly believable,
too.

As I’ve been watching the current DCverse on TV, I’ve been
commenting on the perfect timing between those shows and my seasons of this
show. Once again, that happened here
when Smallville introduced the Justice Society of America in a two parter
mid-season that introduced us to Hawkman, among others. I hadn’t even heard of this hero until this
season’s Flash and Legends of Tomorrow, and I enjoyed
getting a new take on him.

Late in the season, Annette O’Toole returned for an episode
as Martha Kent, bringing her real life husband, Michael McKean, back to reprise
his role as Perry White. It was a
powerful episode that I really enjoyed.

The season is listed as having 21 episodes, but since one of
them was a two hour episode, this really was a normal length season. All the episodes are here on six discs looking
and sounding great in wide screen and full surround. Extras include a smattering of deleted
scenes, two interesting commentaries on episodes early in the season, and two
featurettes, one on Zod and one of the Justice Society two parter.

Overall, I felt that season 9 of Smallville brought the show back to its strengths, characters we
love and fun superhero action. I’m
looking forward to seeing how this particular take on Superman wraps up in the
final season.

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I'm an accountant by trade but a reviewer at heart. Top reviewer at Amazon. Love to read, watch TV and movies, and listen to music. And I'm always looking to share and discuss what I am currently consuming.

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